The sense of doom grew in the pit of your stomach. You wanted this ordeal to be over, so you could curl up in your warm bed and listen as Felix cracked jokes or Zephyriah told you that everything would be alright. The feeling that you suddenly had was something you had always despised: that sense of uselessness and inability. You were paralyzed by your own insecurity and fear, and you knew that this was not the time or place for that to happen. There was too much at stake here. There was no one there to help you.

The fear was not alone, however, as you also felt anger swell up inside you. You wanted to do something—anything—if it meant you could leave the crater and go home, but your feet felt like lead, and you fought the growing urge to give up and accept your fate in the crater. But the mere thought of walkers rushing at your body and burying their rotten teeth into your flesh made you shiver and cringe. They were such primitive beings that you knew it would be painfully messy; they would likely bite at whatever they could find first, with no ability or willingness to ease your pain and suffering.

The cry you uttered met no response. Your spine tingled as you were growing increasingly confident that the shadow was a walker. They obviously would not respond when you called them, and they evidently lacked mental functions for you to detect. Somehow, though, believing that it was a mindless beast—as opposed to something far more dangerous—did not give you any comfort. You needed to know for sure. What if your enemy was something legitimately far worse? What if you came into contact with one of the terrifying members of the Golden Banner?

Your foot slipped as you scrambled up the embankment. Your arms reached down beneath you to brace your fall, but you were not quick enough in your frenzied, panicked state. Your elbows grated against the chewed up gravel, and you felt immediately the sting as you scraped them. Without even reaching to touch, you knew that the dirt had cut open the skin, and the warm sensation of a thin trickle of blood down your arm verified that you were bleeding. But the real realization came a few moments later, when you figured that those beasts out there would smell your blood and sense your weakness...

They would close in for the kill; you had to get out of there. The good fortune of avoiding them while you were sitting duck in the crater probably would not last. And you did not want to be unprepared when your luck ran out.